Cuba in 1959 was both festive and sombre. Jubilation greeted the flight of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who left the island as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were poised to enter the capital, Havana. Soon after this, special tribunals in an old colonial fortress ran the juicios sumarios, short trials of former regime officials, which often ended with a death sentence and a firing squad. That year, my Mexican grandfather went to Cuba with a skilled cameraman to make a documentary about the Cuban Revolution. He met Raúl Castro, the leader’s brother and hardliner, among others. One day, he was on an internal flight over the island, which happened to be transporting batistianos, or members of the old regime, whose fate, no doubt, was not going to be merciful. Suddenly, they overpowered their revolutionary guards, known as barbudos (bearded ones), and grabbed their weapons. They then ordered the pilot to fly to the Dominican Republic, hoping that the country’s friendly dictator, Rafael Trujillo, might welcome them with open arms. The barbudo pilot told the batistianos: ‘I will land wherever you like on the island but not beyond.’ When the gun-wielding batistiano insisted, the pilot lifted his hands from the controls and said, llévatelo tú! (you fly it!). As the plane began to dive, the old regime hijackers had no answer and were check-mated. They landed in Cuba, to my grandfather’s relief.

With its revolution, Cuba propelled itself to the centre of Latin American politics and of the Cold War, fixing the attention of the world on its politics and alliances during the Missile Crisis of 1962. Yet the plucky, highly politicised island was the exception that proved the rule. For most of its history, the rest of Latin America has been more inwardly oriented, more parochial, and more introspective than Cuba. The great Cuban patriot José Martí, who died during the War of Independence against Spain in 1895, admonished the rest of Latin America, saying, ‘That which remains of the village mentality in America must now awaken.’ The continental scope of Martí’s hopeful admonition was problematic. What was America? Did it include Brazil, whose history and politics differed significantly from that of the Spanish-speakers? Was it an effort to wrest the concept away from the hands of the United States, which carried it in its very name? ‘Latin America’, by contrast, is a more tangible concept, taking shape over the course of the 19th century and encompassing the countries where Romance languages are spoken. It excludes, for most, the British Caribbean, which remained part of a European empire for much longer.

Both pioneer and late-comer, Latin America embodies a temporal paradox that has shaped its role in the international order since its independence from Spain and Portugal in the early 19th century. Late to the world of nation-states (with regard to Europe and the US) but early to colonial emancipation (with regard to the Afro-Asian world); generally early to outlaw slavery yet a mainstay of its ‘Indian summer’, the widespread use of coerced or semi-free labour for cash crops; its intellectual leaders were early adopters of the European Enlightenment, in both its neo-absolutist and revolutionary variants, yet slow to resolve the agrarian, social, ethnic and institutional problems of the European colonial legacy.

This temporal ambivalence engendered a splendid literary and artistic culture, and a very intense tradition of internal political struggle between anti-clerical liberals and clerical conservatives, regionalists and federalists, and indigenous nations and white or mixed-race settlers, among others. Even the unpolitical often found themselves under pressure to choose sides. In Gabriel García Márquez’s brilliant novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Buendía is asked whether he supports the liberals or the conservatives, who were contending for power in his village, Macondo. Having seen the conservatives stuff the ballot with their blue tokens (as opposed to the red ones of the liberals), he declared himself with the liberals ‘because the conservatives are a bunch of cheats.’

In a sense, the whole of Latin America was Macondo, a village in which passionate struggle often drew in the less committed and where deep faultlines echoed, however distantly, those of Europe. That temporal ambivalence and inwardness made it harder to deal with the only great power in their neighbourhood: the United States. The differences between them made for a great disparity in power. First, there was geography. By the 1820s, twenty years after the Louisiana Purchase, the United States was criss-crossed by powerful navigable rivers and served by vast fertile plains, which it was partly settling and partly wresting from native peoples by war, by treaty or both. The US was also located in the North Atlantic, a prime spot for the carrying trade to Europe and for lucrative fisheries. Soon, it would add a second ocean coast to its territory, connecting it to Asia and the Pacific as well. Second, the core of the industrial revolution in the US was one of creative small craftsmanship combined with a vast internal market and growing purchasing power – the environment that produced a Thomas Edison. Latin America had nothing to compare with that.

These divergent geographies and occupational structures made for economic disparity. But the political dimension was just as important. The inward reckoning with the Spanish colonial legacy consumed Latin American politics: the legal rights of the army and the Church; the status of Church land and that of indigenous communities; the legacies of racial stratification in the Spanish Empire. By contrast, the United States developed a sense of universal mission reflected in the mind of Thomas Jefferson, president 1801-1809, an eclectic but powerful cocktail of Enlightenment republicanism and Protestant motifs. The US possessed the freest government in the world, the best hope of humanity, its very novelty granting it superiority over the benighted world of monarchical tradition. The pursuit of happiness, independent from the tutelage of feudal hierarchy or Church, an armed citizenry as opposed to a privileged army, and, above all, the sense that ‘westward the star of empire wends its way’ made Americans feel they were not just the challengers of Europe but its heirs as leaders of the international order. Figures like John Adams, president 1797-1801, regarded the Hispanic world as incapable of self-government. All this supplied underlying ideological motifs to their relations with Latin America.

By contrast, nationalism had yet to penetrate the hinterland of most Latin American republics. A pan-nationalism that could have rivalled the incipient universal mission and self-conception of the United States existed in the mind of Simon Bolivar and in the rhetoric of many of the insurgent leaders who fought Spain in the 1810s and 20s, but not in the political dynamic and structures of their states. Moreover, efforts to consolidate the Hispanic territories into large political entities failed at the very moment the United States was expanding rapidly. A conference in Panama in the late 1820s had few consequences. The state of Gran Colombia, encompassing today’s Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, broke apart in 1830. The Central American Republic collapsed in 1838. In terms of political imagination and territorial consolidation, the US and Latin America were travelling in opposite directions.

In his annual message to Congress in 1823, President James Monroe warned Europe not to intervene in the Western Hemisphere, following the restoration of a conservative regime in Spain and noises made by some in Europe about reconquering the newly independent Latin American republics. The first to feel the effects of the ‘Monroe Doctrine’ was Mexico, independent from Spain since 1821 and closest to the United States. In the early years of independence, offsetting US influence with European ties was an obvious response. In the 1820s, the US ambassador to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, meddled heavily in Mexican politics, seeking to shore up the incipient liberal faction and to steer its politics towards an American orientation and away from Britain. The British ambassador lambasted the United States at embassy dinners and London granted both loans and recognition, as would France. Yet such ties could also backfire when repayment or damages were demanded.

In the 1820s, Mexico nervously allowed settlers into Texas, then part of its territory. The slave-holding Texans had had to draw up contracts of service for 99 years for their slaves since Mexico had outlawed slavery. In 1834-35, the centralist conservatives ousted the Mexican federalist liberals from power in Mexico City. They sought to amalgamate Texas with Coahuila, another state, and abolish its autonomy. Texas rebelled. Among the rebels were American settlers but also federalist Mexican Texans, or Tejanos. Mexico’s internal conflict came face to face with the culturally confident, expansive settler dynamic of the United States, sending out vanguards of colonists like the ancient Greeks and Romans had done. In early 1836, General Santa Anna led a Mexican army northward to bring the Texans to heel. After a gruelling march crossing the desert in winter, they besieged and took the thinly but heroically defended Alamo, an event immortalised in films. Yet a few weeks later Santa Anna was beaten by the Texan leader Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto.

He surrendered to an injured Houston, who was sitting against a tree, a wounded leg stretched out. In a cruel irony of history, it was the defeated party who was left standing. The Texans made him sign a treaty recognising their independence, with a secret clause adding that he would lobby for its recognition in Mexico. About to be released, a baying mob of Texans threatened his life. He was clapped in irons again and kept in prison. At the end of 1836, he was sent to Washington, still a prisoner.

Long before the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, was captured and taken to New York, Santa Anna was taken to the White House, where he had an interview with President Andrew Jackson to discuss the potential purchase of California. Just before he left office in 1837, Jackson recognised Texan independence. Santa Anna returned to Mexico in disgrace, yet an opportunity to redeem himself soon beckoned. In 1838, a French fleet attacked the Mexican port of Veracruz because of unpaid debts and damages. The most famous of these claims was that of a French baker near Mexico City, Monsieur Remontel, whose shop had been robbed by one of the military factions vying for control of the country. Santa Anna led troops in the skirmish at the port and lost his leg in the action. His credit with the nation restored, he had his severed leg buried with full military honours. Ironically, it had been Santa Anna’s men who had robbed Remontel’s shop back in 1832.

Jackson’s inquiry about California had not been a mere aside. Nor had his recognition of Texas. In 1845, the latter joined the Union, pushing the US border far to the south of where it had been in the 1830s. In 1846, President Polk concocted a border incident to start hostilities with Mexico. The country was invaded from the north by General Zachary Taylor (who would be elected president of the US in 1848) and from the east by General Winfield Scott. Taylor defeated Santa Anna at the Battle of Buena Vista. Scott marched into Mexico City, flying the Stars and Stripes from the hilltop Castle of Chapultepec on 15 September 1847, after a heroic, and since partly mythologised, defence by the Mexicans. Six military cadets lost their lives defending the castle, cementing a key plank of Latin America’s relationship with the US: the cult of military martyrdom in the face of overwhelming force and defeat.

In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of February 1848, Mexico ceded a huge swathe of its northern territory (including what became California, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Utah and Colorado) in exchange for $15 million. It was the culmination of the Monroe Doctrine, to which Jacksonian Democrats now added the term ‘Manifest Destiny.’ This lent to the idea of the superiority of American self-government, with its Protestant and Enlightenment legacies, a more urgent and more forthright dimension. Universal mission now entailed the annexation of the territory of other nation-states. It would be followed by unsuccessful dreams to annex Cuba and parts of Central America in the 1850s in order to strengthen Southern slavery.

The 1890s then witnessed a new turn to intervention. Suspecting Britain of trying to intervene in Brazil, in 1894 President Grover Cleveland sent five ships, the most imposing fleet the US had ever sent to sea, to support the Brazilian government against a rebellion and protect US exports. In November, grateful pro-government Brazilians laid the cornerstone a monument in Rio de Janeiro to James Monroe and his Doctrine.

The most important caesura in the history of post-independence Latin America came in 1898 when Spain lost a war to the United States, its Caribbean and Pacific fleets sunk in a matter of hours. The US established a protectorate over Cuba, curtailing its sovereignty in the Platt Amendment of 1901, which controlled the new Island Republic’s foreign policy. In 1903, the US orchestrated the independence of Panama from Colombia to enable the building of the Panama Canal, completed in 1914. This was more than Manifest Destiny. The American Civil War of 1861-65, and the cold materialism of the Gilded Age that followed, had cooled the romanticism that believed in Destiny with a capital D. Instead, or rather on top of that ideology, came a geopolitical anxiety. In 1890, the naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan warned that the southern coast of the US was vulnerable to foreign powers. It was imperative to consolidate control of the Caribbean.

Mahan became immensely influential worldwide and his navalism, which also championed the superiority of American democracy, undergirded interventions in Mexico and Central America in that period. Following the Monroe Doctrine, it was the US, not Latin America (with the important exception of Mexico in the 1860s), that brought pressure to bear against European influence and ventures, including a multinational European effort to recover Venezuelan debts using warships in 1902-03. The ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine, which resulted from the crisis, claimed the right to intervene in the internal affairs of these nations if disorder threatened US interests.

The Latin American left has historically attributed all these ills to US design and malevolence, conveniently exonerating their native lands. Yet the coups and dictatorships that blighted the 20th century grew out of Latin America’s own politics and traditions. They were cheerfully accepted and sometimes actively aided by the US, who found them congenial to its commercial and geopolitical interests. The Cold War intensified the intimacy of that relationship on both sides. In 1961, President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress initiative revealed the idealistic side of American universalism (in conscious rivalry to Soviet Communism), promising billions of dollars in funding for development. Kennedy also befriended centre-left leaders like Betancourt in Venezuela and Frondizi of Argentina. Far from having a consistently malevolent attitude, the US tried, and failed, to persuade Latin American elites to redistribute wealth and undertake agrarian reform. Yet the Latin American economy was ultimately too dependent on fluctuating commodity prices like those of coffee. In that domain, US and European willingness to make concessions was limited.

But it was the Cuban Revolution that fatally undermined the Alliance for Progress. Kennedy, who authorised the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, lost perspective and saw all Latin American politics through the Cuban lens, despite warnings about this from Betancourt. His penchant for counterinsurgency added to this obsession and soon he, and his successors, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, militarised the relationship with their southern neighbours, funding their militaries and supporting coups in the Dominican Republic (1963) Brazil (1964), Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976), among others. Reagan’s intervention in Grenada in 1983 was in the same tradition.

The Cuban problem was not just about proximity (Cuba is 90 miles from Florida) nor economic interests (US firms were nationalised in 1960). The intensely political island became the mirror-image of US universalism, the exception to the inwardness of Latin America. Its synthesis of heroic, Latin pan-nationalism and Soviet-style Communism produced a two-fold motif for hemispheric and even world politics, just like the American synthesis of Enlightenment republicanism and Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. Cuba had a potentially seductive message for the region as a whole. It was this that led the US to contribute to the capture and execution of that most universal of Cuban revolutionaries, the Argentine comandante Che Guevara, in Bolivia in 1967. Moreover, it is often forgotten that it took the persuasive powers of UN Secretary-General U Thant to convince Fidel Castro to allow the peaceful dismantling and transportation of the Soviet missiles out of Cuba in 1962 without further inflaming tensions. Castro was furious with the Soviets for backing down.

For the US, the Caribbean remains the proud window of Latin America onto ideological universality and challenge. The Venezuelan regime of Chávez-Maduro was and is the conscious heir of Castro and has links to both Russia and China. Like Cuba, its political culture and national pride are a force to be reckoned with. In 1958, Vice-President Nixon was attacked by a patriotic crowd in Caracas and was relieved to emerge alive. The January 2026 capture of President Maduro, the latest twist in Washington’s relations with Venezuela, suggests that Trump has taken to heart Monroeist and Mahanian injunctions about fortifying the region geopolitically and keeping out other great powers. It is a powerful combination.